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HUGE decrease in links since website redesign

These new pages were constructed on a dev site, and then pushed live. Since the new site has gone live I have seen a huge decline in links.

My external followed links have dropped from 3000 to 500 and my total website links have fallen from 35,000 to 4,500.

I have done some research, and I think there is a server side issue. Where multiple versions of my URL may be running. The majority of the links built were pointing to the homepage. That being said I do not have access to our in-house dev person this week, so I am trying to identify the problem myself.

I have used screaming frog to crawl my site and did not see any errors which stand out. I realize I probably need to use 301 redirects to solve this problem, I just need some guidance on how to identify what I need to 301 redirect.

Second question.

If I move a landing page out of the global navigation but it can still be reached through other pages on the website , will this cause issues?

9 Responses

As far as the second question, it could have an impact on its rankings. For example, if the page was liked to from the home page and subsequent to the change, there isn't a link from the home page, it could lose rankings because of it.

I can tell you without a doubt if you are in fact did replace your entire website as you state

"Since the new site has gone live I have seen a huge decline in links."

however prior to that you are talking about just adding pages. So if you could tell me yes this is a brand-new website or no I'm just adding pages it would clear up a lot and if you're just adding pages to your website I agree with Chris.

If you are in fact somebody that had their website re built or anything that would have to do with changing servers you or platforms.

Then it is most likely a 301 redirect that you need to concentrate on. If you have not implemented redirects from your old website to the new website you will lose the dramatic amount of links.

If you could tell me what is your site built from HTML and maybe you moved it wordpress or another content management system?

if so you can have these types of issues fixed very easily using cms2cms.com

if you are pointing all your links at your homepage I would try to spread them out as much as you can. Just so we're clear most websites with 35,000 links have them spread all over the place. I would advise that you do the same with yours. As that's a lot of links just to the homepage. Screaming frog is an awesome tool it should be able to actually accomplish what you're looking to do with the paid version do you have the paid version?

If you would kindly update me on this I will respond with a more helpful answer.

While I'd love to comment (and I know you're hesitant to provide a URL), I don't think that you'll get any truly useful advice that would help since there could be so many reasons why you'd encounter issues after a site design change. The useful advice comes from those who will analyze your site, see what changed and determine what changes (or open items poorly done or overlooked) might be a good indicator of how your rankings dropped. Everything else is speculating in the dark. There is no substitute to taking a good look, IMHO.

Thank you everyone for answering me back and I would just like to clarify a few points.

Thomas: Even though only a few additional pages were added the entire website was professionally recoded in HTML. Prior to the recode our site was coded in a combination of languages and not efficient. So even though the URL is the same the code has totally been redone.

As far as the link distribution, the links are spread out across our landing pages but slightly more skewed in the direction of the homepage.

As far as screaming frog, I will see if I can get my hands on the paid version today. I currently use the free version.

I have come up with a list of tools I think you will benefit from. Primarily I know you will benefit from screaming frog however I believe there's a better method once you have it then screaming frog's own guide that is by a company called Seer it costs nothing for the guide and have given the links below that you want to check out.

I want to share what I believe happened when your site was recoded the on page anchor text for the links that are pointing at your site were either broken or the anchor text/link does not exist anymore on the webpage.

The Seer interactive how to verify back links and in view the anchor text

guide for screaming frog is designed to help people find the links however you're doing it on your own site it doesn't really matter what the purpose behind it was this tool will help you.

I have also added information from Internet marketing ninjas they have some of the best free tools on the market and their web-based I strongly suggest you using their broken link tester right away. Along with their site map generator to look for broken links and you can use the combination of Moz OSE along with majestic and SEO a-ref there built into screaming frog to see what is pointing at you.

In other important factor in this is what are you hosted on is it IIS, Apache, light speed, or Nginx.

The reason being is if I were on a host like one of my favorites for important large sites or really all websites in general it's excellent for FireHost.com

Then I could simply figure out which links are pointing to my site then have the host preferably somebody like I mentioned above that does fully managed hosting would do all the 301 redirects on the server side completely away from coding on your website and making them much faster and stronger.

He's no I recommend this regardless over the host does or not it should be implemented server-side

Please know that you're welcome to contact me I will private message you my cell phone number if you want more information I will happily tell you.

One of the easiest ways to do this would be to hire a person like Dan Shure a top rank SEO as well as a truly helpful and ethical person. You would have to contact him for an exact price.

or

Yoast to do a site analysis is price right now is approximately $1000 however many companies charge a lot more in the is a very well respected authority as a developer

Evolving SEO Dan Shure is a true specialist who has even done whiteboard Fridays here on Moz.com is a truly standup guy as well. Is Dan Shure does some consulting and could be asked for his pricing He has spoken at Mozcation , Distilled NYC MeetUp the list goes on. He can be reached easily at its business evolving SEO

If I had a dime for every "professionally recoded" website that was completely hosed from an optimization standpoint...

Not sure why people are throwing out link distribution and other wild-ass-guesses that would have nothing to do with disappearing incoming links. The simplest answer is often the most accurate.Did your site's domain change? Or did any inner page URLs change? If so, then you'll need to 301 those to their current counterparts. ScreamingFrog is good for finding broken/missing links, but you can also take a look at the Crawl Errors in Google webmaster tools to see if Googlebot is having any problems finding your pages. If no URLs were changed or removed, then it probably doesn't have anything to do with the redesign.

Check with majesticseo.com and ahrefs.com to see if the links have been marked as lost or removed recently. Both of those are pretty quick to spot new and removed links.

The sharp drop in number of links could have come from one or more sites removing your link or the page/site just doesn't exist anymore. If one site with 20000 pages disappears and they had a sitewide link to you, that would explain it. Do you happen to know how many linking domains you had, compared to how many you currently have? That would be a better indicator.

And your second question (missed that the first time):If the page is still accessible from somewhere, it won't be a "problem", but it may not rank as well. That really depends on a whole lot of other things - external links to that page, other internal links to it from and the crawlability of the site in general. But in general, no it won't be a huge problem - I have a few pages on my own site that only have one internal link from the sitemap and no external links, yet they still rank for some things.

This is a good answer that just led me to think about some items that are not necessarily URL related. I'd do what Nick suggests firsts. The wisdom around the water cooler is that the most important content should be placed towards the top of your pages to ensure that spiders reach it and can get a good indication of what a page is all about. What I've seen are "professional recoded pages" by great designers who really aren't great coders or great coders who focus mostly on browser compatibility but not on how spiders might prefer the format.

What am I getting at? What is in your sidebar and where is it located in the source code of your page? I've seen two significant changes that might make a difference:

(1) Your sidebar that has lots of secondary and promotional content is appearing at the top of your page and your post content is underneath it.

(2) The page looks great but there is a ton of other junk that loads in your header tags well before your content areas on your pages. You would be incredibly surprised how "professional themes" will have options to make things so convenient for webmasters. Wordpress themes that have special options are notorious for having clickable buttons that suddenly load lots of code in the header tags.

(3) Custom javascript in the header. Typically you can load something common like jQuery and there won't be an issue or everyone would have it. You get into trouble when someone custom codes an awesome thigamajig for you not knowing what else is on your site and which may lead to errors in your header and trouble for spiders.

This is all speculation but I've found these issues crop up in the past. Good luck.

I want to say I agree with what you're saying as well I just posted my response which I did not realize was not posted prior it log me out regardless of that

I believe he can do it with the tools Both you and have suggested I've given them above and Considering we are essentially saying the same thing.

it could be anything from somebody not linking the anchor text on the page to leaving the inbound link out altogether. I believe he should use his host if it's a managed hosting company for instance fire host because my site is on Nginx does all the 301 redirects for you many other web hosting companies like iWeb and data pipe will do the same.

However it seems like whoever did the coding was more of a developer/web designer then anyone who is concerned with SEO

I'm not saying that they didn't do their job right please don't think that it just sounds like SEO is not there specialty.

I have listed some methods I think will help I also believe what Nick here is saying is right on the money. Basically, your site even with the same URL when it has been recoded can have everything you think should be there but if it's not in the code the links won't work.

I hope this is been of help, and I want to say I back up what Nick has said.

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